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American Romanticism
1800-1860
Summarized notes from HOLT
Chapter 2
The Romantic Sensibility:
Celebrating Imagination
 In general, Romanticism
is the name given to those
schools of thought that
value feeling and
intuition over reason.
The Romantic Sensibility:
Celebrating Imagination
 Romanticism, especially in Europe, developed as part of a
reaction against rationalism.
 The Romantics came to believe that, through the
imagination, you could discover truths that the
rational mind could not reach.
 To the Romantics, the imagination, individual feelings,
and wild nature were of greater value than reason and
logic.
 Poetry was considered the highest embodiment of the
Romantic imagination.
 Poetry used typical English forms and themes
Romantic Escapism:
From Dull Realities to Higher Truths
 The Romantics wanted to rise above
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the “dull realities” to a realm of
higher truth.
They did this in two principal ways:
First, the Romantics searched for
exotic settings in the more “natural”
past, far from the grimy and noisy
industrial age. Sometimes they
found this world in the supernatural
realm or in old legends and folklore.
Second, the Romantics tried to
reflect on the natural world until dull
reality fell away to reveal underlying
truth and beauty.
This second Romantic approach is
evident in many lyric poems.
Romantic Escapism:
From Dull Realities to Higher Truths
 A flower found by a stream or a bird flying
overhead brings the speaker to some important,
deeply felt insight, which is then recorded in the
poem.
 The Puritans’ lessons were defined by their
religion.
 The Romantics, on the other hand, found a less
clearly defined divinity in nature.
 Their contemplation of the natural world led to a
more generalized emotional and intellectual
awakening.
The American Novel and
the Wilderness Experience
 The development of the American novel
coincided with westward expansion, with the
growth of nationalist spirit, and with the rapid
spread of cities.
 We can see how the novel developed by looking at
the career of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–
1851).
 Cooper explored uniquely American settings
and characters: frontier communities,
American Indians, and the wilderness of
western New York and Pennsylvania.
 Most of all, he created the first American heroic
figure: Natty Bumppo (also known as Hawkeye,
Deerslayer, and Leatherstocking), a skilled
frontiersman whose simple morality and almost
superhuman resourcefulness mark him as a true
Romantic hero.
American Romantic Poetry:
Read at Every Fireside
 The American Romantic novelists looked for new
subject matter and new themes, but the opposite
tendency appears in the works of the Romantic
poets.
 They attempted to prove their sophistication by
working solidly within European literary traditions
rather than crafting a unique American voice.
 Even when they constructed
poems with American settings
and subject matter, the American
Romantic poets used typically
English themes, meter, and imagery.
American Romantic Poetry:
Read at Every Fireside
 The Fireside Poets—as the
Boston group of Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, John
Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, and James Russell
Lowell was called—were, in their
own time and for many decades
afterward, the most popular poets
America had ever produced.
 They were called Fireside Poets
because their poems were often
read aloud at the fireside as family
entertainment.
 The Fireside Poets were unable to
recognize the poetry of the future,
which was being written right
under their noses.
The Transcendentalists:
True Reality Is Spiritual
 At the heart of America’s coming-of-age
were the Transcendentalists, who were
led by Massachusetts writer and
lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson.
 Transcendental refers to the idea that
in determining the ultimate reality of
God, the universe, the self, and other
important matters, one must
transcend, or go beyond, everyday
human experience in the physical
world.
 Like many Americans today, they also
believed in human perfectibility, and
they worked to achieve this goal.
Emerson and Transcendentalism:
The American Roots
 Emerson was the most influential and best-known member of
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the Transcendentalist group.
His writing and that of his friend Henry David Thoreau (1817–
1862) clearly and forcefully expressed Transcendentalist ideas.
Emerson’s view of the world sprang not from logic but from
intuition.
Intuition is our capacity to know things spontaneously and
immediately through our emotions rather than through our
reasoning abilities.
Intuitive thought—the kind Emerson believed in—contrasts
with the rational thinking of someone like Benjamin Franklin.
God is good, and God works through nature, Emerson
believed.
Emerson’s Optimistic Outlook
 If we can simply trust ourselves—that is, trust in the
power each of us has to know God directly—then we
will realize that each of us is also part of the Divine
Soul, the source of all good.
 Emerson’s sense of optimism and hope appealed to
audiences who lived in a period of economic
downturns, regional strife, and conflict over slavery.
 Your condition today, Emerson seemed to tell his
readers and his listeners, may seem dull and
disheartening, but it need not be.
 If you discover the God within you, he suggested,
your lives will become a part of the grandeur of the
universe.
The Dark Romantics
 Emerson’s idealism was exciting for
his audiences, but not all the writers
and thinkers of the time agreed with
Transcendentalist thought.
 Some people think of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and
Edgar Allan Poe as antiTranscendentalists, because their
views of the world seem opposed to
the optimistic views of Emerson and
his followers.
 But these Dark Romantics, as they
are known, had much in common
with the Transcendentalists.
The Dark Romantics
 In contrast to Emerson, however, the
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Dark Romantics did not believe that
nature is necessarily good or harmless.
Their view of existence developed from
both the mystical and melancholy
features of Puritan thought.
In their works they explored the
conflict between good and evil, the
psychological effects of guilt and sin,
and even madness.
They felt that cities are centers of
corruption and ugliness.
Behind the pasteboard masks of social
respectability, the Dark Romantics saw
the blankness and the horror of evil.
From this imaginative, unflinching vision
they shaped a uniquely American
literature.